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Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Moderation And Agendas
“I suppose there are two views about everything,” said Mark.
“Eh? Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.”
[from C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.]
In the midst of a typically excellent David Limbaugh column, we find the following:
Political analysts warn that overly aggressive efforts to push a conservative agenda could leave Bush and his allies vulnerable to charges of political overreaching, and ultimately cause a voter backlash. … Already Democrats are saying that Republicans are emphasizing an ideological rather than a middle-of-the-road approach to governing.
[...snip...]
In pressing for partial Social Security privatization and overhauling the tax system, Bush is taking a major risk. These are controversial matters that might drive some Republicans to become Democrats.
Limbaugh was quoting an un-linked article from the Chicago Tribune. His response is delightfully cutting:
Such brilliance. It’s like saying Republicans should forfeit their agenda now or else they might have to in the future. They should give up a bird in the hand for none in the bush. Either way, no conservative agenda. How convenient for liberals.
But the whole tempest is symptomatic of a larger and far more important matter: the false gods of moderation and compromise.
“Moderation in all things,” counseled Epictetus. When a student asked him if that advice applied to moderation itself, which would logically require us to be extreme about at least a few things, the philosopher was stunned. He’d fallen into the very trap that bedevils contemporary politics: the fallacy that moderation is a value.
“Moderation,” shorn of all context, is not only value-free but semantically empty as well. The same could be said for its linguistic opposite, “extremism.”
Name a political subject; that is, name a condition, process, or hazard that might conceivably be improved by State action. Conceive of a position on that subject. How does one judge it to be moderate or immoderate? By where it fits into the range of possible positions on the subject? Or by where it stands in opinion polls? Or by how dramatic its results are likely to be?
In recent years, the evaluation “moderate” has been used in a number of tendentious ways, none of which bear on the probable effectiveness of a policy, on its foreseeable costs, or on the likelihood of undesirable side effects and unintended consequences. In particular, the heavily left-leaning Old Media have used “moderate” as a way of encouraging Republican office-holders to be less conservative.
It’s all nonsense. A moment’s thought is all that’s required to dispel the moderation miasma...which only goes to show how few moments we take for thought.
Assuming that one has grasped some problem accurately—that is, he has all the relevant facts about it—what would he ask about a proposed solution to it?
- Would it really ameliorate the problem?
- How much would it cost?
- What other effects would it have?
- Would it violate any legal, moral, or ethical constraints?
None of those questions depends in any way upon anyone’s judgment of the proposal as “moderate” or “extreme.”
The enthronement of “moderation” as a value has led to another insubstantial yet unquestioned shibboleth: “compromise.” One must compromise between the “extremes,” don’t y’know; it’s the moderate thing to do. But why? Is it because the “extreme” positions don’t work, or are unaffordable, or would have undesirable side effects, or would violate the rights of some group of innocents?
Usually not. Usually it’s just a reflexive demand, no more rationally grounded than the worship of “moderation.”
Worse is possible, of course. At one point, the Soviets enunciated and acted on an idea that came to be called the Brezhnev Doctrine: that “fraternal countries” had an enforceable right—enforceable by the Soviet Union, of course—to “preserve the gains of socialism,” regardless of any change of heart among their citizens. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and engineered a coup in Poland in service to this idea.
American liberals’ domestic version of this doctrine differs only in that, rather than appeal to some foreign power to invade and avert the horrors of competitive capitalism from our shores, they declaim ominously about “backlash” and “reaction.” They “advise” their opponents to “compromise” on their agenda, for “the sake of amity.” This is one of the central currents of left-liberal rhetoric these past fifty years.
Britain’s Labourites took a similar stance toward the reforms of Margaret Thatcher’s Administration. Prominent Labourites responded to each privatization initiative by calling it retrogressive. Their candidates vowed to restore the Labour-engineered status quo ante at each campaign...despite the wild popularity that each Thatcher initiative enjoyed.
Ultimately, the Labour Party did come around a bit. One cannot swim against the tide of popular sentiment forever if one wants to retain some influence over political discourse. But the similarity of their attitude and rhetoric to that of American left-liberals, in the face of the wave of popularity enjoyed by their ideological and electoral opponents, must be grasped in its full significance.
It’s not a thrust at the effectiveness, affordability, controllability, or morality of conservative proposals. Indeed, it has no rational aspects at all. It’s a loser’s demand that the losers get their way at the expense of the victors—a demand that would be laughed out of court if the positions were reversed.
Comments
You’re right: ‘moderation,’ in the abstract, is empty. But moderation in the context of dynamic systems—be these organisms or societies—is enormously important. Homeostasis is the foundation of adaptation and the sine qua non of survival. And homeostasis in a political organism requires never varying too far from the mean, and especially insuring that the boot of the victor weigh not too heavily upon the neck of the loser in any given contest, regardless of the ‘rights’ and ‘morals’ and ‘agendas’ that may be flouted, the individual acts of depravity, genius or unusual enterprise that may be ignored or reverse-compensated in such re-equilibration.
This notion, I think, is at the core of the modern Democratic platform. More than any strictly “leftist” idea of centralized, state authority is the idea that _some_ agency (by default, the state) must have as its care the constant re-equilibration required to preserve homeostasis: to insure that the poor don’t get _much_ poorer, the rich not _much_ richer (and beyond this, that the lives of rich and poor differ not so much in joy), regardless of disparities in wealth, property, position, gifts and energies.
Seen in this way, moderation is both real and active. Fundamentalists—be they of the religious, moral, legal or logical persuasion—would view it as amoral. But Lewis, I suspect, would not: he considered moderation a prime virtue of natural morality, which he proposed as the antidote both to fundamentalisms and to the errors of the modern secular state in its selving as benevolent technocracy (i.e., as a state whose prime concerns are efficacy, cost, side effects and other constraints).
Ultimately, Lewis viewed Christianity itself as deriving its legitimacy from the inheritance of natural morality. And Christianity is frequently paradoxical: its project, more often than not, is to flout law, rights, and legitimate agendas in favor of a higher balance: to deliver women from stoning, to take from the rich, to ennoble the poor, to render unto Caesar, etc.
Posted by on 11/30/2004 at 12:21 PM"Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks!” - Robert Heinlein
Posted by on 11/30/2004 at 02:40 PMAh the “But Monekeys” are the best thing the Left ever saw. They work for the Left even better than the strident Left. All that the But Monkey needs is but a loud complaint from the Left and they say “it doesn’t matter how outlandish their demands are, if you don’t move towards them, it is you who is the extremist and I’m only the God-blessed mitigator.”
Go to hell “But Monkeys” is what needs to be said. And said frequently.
Posted by Pascal Fervor on 11/30/2004 at 05:39 PM
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